The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

It required three tons of Allied bombs to kill a German citizen during the Second World War. By that quantitative measure, the strategic arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War held latent some three billion deaths,

“it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”

Of course, we are all doomed.

“When your ancestors were still living in the trees mine were already forging cheques!”

If hostilities cannot, repeat cannot be avoided the United States desires that Japan

commit the first overt act. . . . Measures should be carried out so as not, repeat not, to alarm civil population or disclose intent.1528

Let the Soviet Union discover the information on its own, build the bombs and drop them, oppose the Soviets at the end of the war with an Anglo-American nuclear monopoly, and the likeliest outcome was a nuclear arms race.

Churchill circled “collaborate” and wrote in the margin: “on no account.”

as he confessed many years afterward, “a very great sense of revulsion and of wrong.”

“I wanted to live and to give and I got paralyzed somehow,”

The committee completed its review by abandoning any pretension that its objectives there were military:

“What will you do tomorrow about the rattlesnakes?” He said, “I’ll take a bottle of whiskey.”2406 I then went into my usual speech, telling him how one could imagine that things might get out of control in this, that, or a third manner. But we had discussed these things repeatedly, and we could not see how, in actual fact, we could get into trouble. Then I asked him, “And what do you think about it?” There in the dark Bob thought for a moment, then said, “I’ll take a second bottle of whiskey.”